American Uncivil War

People pass away, mentalities perdure.

The English were not the first colonizers of North America. However, when they finally got there, it was with the most effective ethics to enforce the objectives of ultimate greed. England had been too busy with recalcitrant Scotland and Ireland to join the early conquistadores (meanwhile, the French re-conquered much of the Mediterranean from the Muslims, and even the Canaries archipelago).

The English arrived nearly a century after the Spaniards and the French… and six centuries after the Vikings! With a very different sort of leaders. And with a very different mood, uncontrolled greed foremost.

The reason that the Vikings did not conquer North America was that the aboriginals strongly objected to the Scandinavian presence. When Jacques Cartier arrived in 1534 CE in Quebec, the story repeated itself. The French had firearms, but they were taken aback by the sophisticated discourses of the inhabitants, who explained to the French that there was no space for both the aborigines, and the French. And if the French insisted upon invading the place, there would be war. In due course, over many generations, the French government persuaded the Natives that they could learn to farm, too, and then there was space for everybody.

The Spaniards were not as kind. In 1529, Francisco Pizarro received royal approval to conquer the region and be its viceroy. The letter read: “In July 1529 the queen of Spain signed a charter allowing Pizarro to conquer the Incas. Pizarro was named governor and captain of all conquests in New Castile”. It is not just a question of race. The Spaniards also used Black Conquistadores, professional soldiers who had been captured in Africa, in African wars, and sold to the Spaniards. Then those African soldiers were freed to do what they did best again…in the Americas, with European weapons.

Colombus exploited, according to Satan, Las Casas revolted against Satan. The Spaniards taught their ferocity in the Canaries islands, once they took over from the French, massacring the tall, white blonde aborigines. Ferocity can procreate and multiply. The worse being that it works.

Las Casas took part in the conquest of Cuba, and was granted by the crown a huge land, anencomienda, complete with slaves. Then he moved to the continent. Finally, Bartolomé de las Casas had enough of the “unbelievable” holocaust he was a witness of, since its inception. Bartolomé went from adventurer to bishop, and tried to enforce the good side of God.Happily, the (French-born and educated) Spanish king and Roman emperor Charles V ordered an inquiry and trial on the Spanish induced Holocaust in the Americas. The ensuing Valladolid debate was conclusive enough to bring Charles V, the would-be conqueror of Europe blocked by France, into ordering the halt of the Conquista (here I differ from Wikipedia, because I know much more). More exactly, Charles V ordered the halt of completely new conquista, and then resigned (1551 CE, although said resignation was official and final only in 1558 CE).

So the Spaniards did not conquer most of North America…. which should have been a military walk in the park; Spanish exploratory raids had gone all the way to present day Washington DC, finding most of the country emptied by (European generated) epidemics.

The English colony, though, was not founded by a government, inasmuch as a mercantilist collusion of the “West Country Men” and the English government, famous for lining alleyways with skulls in Ireland. One of the investors was the king of England. The English colony was powered by slave labor, from inception. Whites, Indians, Blacks were enslaved. The whites often with the subtlety of “endured servants” contracts (if they ate a pig in the forest, they got another five years, if they escaped to the Indians, they got quartered alive, a disagreeable prospect to keep them in line obsequiously, etc.)

I have long described the “West Country Men” mentality. It is alive and well. What made the English colony profitable was tobacco exploitation, thanks to hundreds of thousands of slaves. Never mind that the king of England execrated tobacco smoking. It was good, very good money, and profits are the supreme value. Never mind the satanic aspects. That’s why it’s called plutocracy.

In the present day USA, governmental violence is a fact. First there is the political violence of “representatives” elected by money, as surely as in the Eighteenth Century England.

In the USA police violence, revolting by Western European standards, is a fact. It is not just after “blacks”. It is the violence of car chases (try 100 mph in a city). The violence which results when not putting the hands on the wheel, when stopped for bogus reasons.

Police officers, armed to the hilt, with a mentality which shoots first and ask question later, are very well paid. The total compensation of a police officer at the University of California, Berkeley, is 200,000 dollars. More than three times the US median family income. That is gigantic, even by American standards. It is also how the 1% buy the army which protects them (so drive a BMW, or a Tesla Model S, to be left alone by police: class solidarity operates…)

Violence in the service of plutocracy is also judicial violence, not just police and political violence. In California, that America of America, full of silicon, and engineers from all over the world, keen to make a fortune, American born citizens were condemned to life in prison, without possibility of parole. For… stealing a slice of pizza.

Why? It insures the peace. The upper middle class will think twice before launching a revolution. If eating pizza can get you killed, imagine what having to eat your own words get you.

Remember Victor Hugo? He wrote, among many other great works, “The Miserables”. The main protagonist, Jean Valjean, early in the Nineteenth Century, is condemned to twenty years prison for stealing a bread. That was was viewed as a horrible injustice, and, at some point the french Republic passed a law saying one cannot be condemned for stealing food.

Just as one cannot be condemned in France, just for fleeing (fleeing being viewed as a fundamental right; although not obeying police is a crime: subtleties, subtleties…)

Now compare again with California, where eating a slice of pizza can get you to the slammer forever… In the 2000’s (the law was amended slightly since: gulping American pizza does not qualify as a major crime anymore, although, of course, it is, for other reasons…).

This was just an example. Possession of “crack cocaine” is punished at twenty times the rate of “cocaine powder” (blacks use rock cocaine, Wall Street uses cocaine powder).

And so on. Meanwhile Federal Magistrates are nominated, and serve a couple of years earning a measly 180,000 dollars, while being extremely partial to Silicon Valley oligopolies, from their judges’ benches. Then they resign, and are employed by the usual suspects, said Silicon Valley oligopolies, earning many millions (I have seen cases, close and personal). “Free market”, anyone?

The educational system is by the wealthiest, for the wealthiest. And ever more so. Educational violence: preventing the lower class to access quality education.

Of course the Whiter House, white as the driven snow, after spending an inordinate amount of time and money plotting with Silicon Valley, knows all of this. It’s Mercantilism on steroids. It does not matter. Obama is gathering plutocrats to pay for his hyper expensive “library” to the greater glory of Uncle Barry’s sedate reign

And all this violence, direct or indirect, works. Watch the rigged presidential elections, with thoroughly corrupt plutocrats running against each other, in a parody of representative democracy.

As long as We The People don’t shoot back. That it does not happen more often, and that militant Islam does not get more recruits, is rather surprising. But times may change. Any day. What will the plutocratic establishment do? Load bigger guns, with more ammunition, and more science fiction weapons. In this particular case of 12 police officers shot, wounded, and killed in Dallas, the gunman, 25, had been trained, apparently very well, as an exterminator in Afghanistan. He was killed by… a robot. Times they are changing, even if plutocracy only grows. What plutocracy needs, is even more spying on the Internet (the gunman had a Facebook account where he expressed his displeasure for the white man…) Inequality can be an expensive call.

The Spanish and English colonies were founded as wars against the Peoples, to satisfy the god of greed, and domination, and the attending mentalities endure.

43 Responses to “American Uncivil War”

“Bitcoin is “mined” by supercomputers, which solve difficult mathematical formulas to generate the currency. Investors buy these machines by the thousands and store them in warehouses where there is cheap electricity and a relatively cool climate.

It turns out the area around Kangding, populated by tall mountains that are scattered with under-used hydro power plants, is an ideal place to mine the digital coins.

“Everyone says this is a virtual currency but in many ways it’s a traditional manufacturing business,” says Xu, who visits the area regularly. “You buy heavy equipment, you burn electricity and you are rewarded with Bitcoin.”

The power of gold is that, like bitcoin today, it is a currency and the value of a currency is how much other people want it.

As these examples show, we think of and treat money as a commodity to be mined, manufactured, stolen, etc. We desire it because it is a quantized value that can give us whatever we want. Yet any value is based on the community’s willingness to trust that currency. Essentially it is a multiparty contract, whether implicitly, or explicitly.

The primary method of manufacturing money today is by running up public debt, which “central banks,” i.e. the money issuers, then buy with their tokens.

Often this debt is also bought by people and institutions, including pension funds, that have excess money and need to store it.

The problem is that while this debt is backed by the government and its ability to tax the entire public, which gives it a veneer of trustworthiness few private debtors have, the funds borrowed are often spent in ways which do not produce much return, from welfare, to warfare. This is because it would compete with private sector investment, since that desires to monopolize all possible income streams.

While this public spending may not be generating much return to itself, it does provide a foundation for a large private sector, from inventions and services the private sector needs, to military and other government contractors.

To compound the irony and hypocrisy, the taxes by which the government would extract some return to pay its debts are derided as a drain on the private sector.

So they can only run faster and pile up more debt. I suspect this need to spend, in order to manufacture money, provides significant impetus to our need to build and use such an enormous military.

So think of it as a drug habit. Capitalism is presumably an efficient method of circulating value around the economy, but its underlaying foundation is to convert all value, through debt, into capital, ie. money.

Now this enormous bubble of hope that is the carrot leading our entire world forward will pop, as the energy to sustain it gets weaker than the forces pushing back, but the polarities of social control are hope and fear. So those who control through fear will gain the upper hand.

Eventually humanity will have to come to terms with the fact there are no free lunches and what goes round, comes round.

In the body, the medium is blood and the store is fat. It doesn’t work to store much fat in the circulation system.

The amount of blood has to be carefully regulated and if the government were to tax excess money out of the system, not just borrow it, then people would have to invest back into what they are currently draining value out of; A strong community and healthy environment. What used to be known as the commons.

We can’t really store our own private wealth as notes in a banking system and expect it not to become corrupted.

Thrust needs backup to sustain it. In 1500, the Spanish had the entire old world, including its diseases, to back them up. Today, the US is perched on the top of a tottering economic balloon, whose presumed value is providing a better life for everyone, but which is currently being revealed as sucking value out of everything. It is like cheating on the foundations of a skyscraper, to put more gold fixtures in the penthouse. It is growing ever more unstable.

Gold does not oxidize and it’s rare. So it could be used as a store of value (even in the Americas). And a means of exchange (throughout Eurasia). By whom? Governments, backed by their armies. Bitcoin is nothing of the sort.

The Etats Generaux were elected, nation-wide, and had caused such severe problems before that the last ones had been in 1614 CE. The fundamental problem being that the kings of the Franks were supposed to be elected. Fundamentally, the monarchy was unconstitutional…

You rightly said the money as we know it is product of commercial banks, giving credit. If traditionally the banks used to give loans to entrepreneurs, hoping that their venture will be successful and they will generate enough cash to repay the debt, it is not so anymore. Since the seventies the credit purpose shifted from credit to entrepreneurs to consumers credit.

This shift happened as the financial markets became more and more sophisticated and the entrepreneurs diversified the sources of their financing, like corporate bonds, equity financing, stock exchange etc. The banks ceased to be the only possible source of financing. Add to it the decline of economic growth rate in the highly developed world, and you will understand that Banks had to make this dangerous shift to consumer credit, mainly mortgages for private houses, and here you have the inevitable, the 2008 year crash. The private households still did not recover from the debt crisis of 2008, and this is the reason why the economy is rather sluggish, the interest rates are close to zero, and the commercial banks are forced to keep reserves, much higher then required by the central banks. The only tool the central banks have to oppose this situation is to purchase the government bonds, reducing the interest rate close to zero, and hoping that it will work. It worked only partly, because the households still carry the debts and the trauma of high indebtedness. Not surprisingly some economist, who did not take in consideration the moral aspects of such a deed, suggested to write of some of these debts. Economically it could maybe even work, but what about the whole system of borrower-lender? It could disrupt the whole system of credit responsibility.
The central banks try an other form of intervention after no more government bonds were left on the market to purchase. They intend to purchase corporate bonds. But this would mean that certain corporations will get more easier to credit than others. Clear discrimination that will be probably unacceptable legally.

Economists and bankers no more fully understand how the economy works, than weathermen fully understand the weather.
To top it off, much that is known is obscured. As I pointed out, much of the value of the money is backed by government debt, yet often politicians go all populist and rail about government spending, while those paying them off have piles of government bonds in their portfolios.
It has to keep cycling. The government borrows excess out of the private sector, including China Inc. and spends it back into other parts of the economy. Otherwise people might realize there is far more money than the system can actually absorb.
Are the people in charge of the military as incompetent as they seem, or are there other motives, like just spending as much as possible?
When the price of bread goes up, people think they are poorer, but if the stock price of the bread company goes up, those owning it think they are richer. So the game for the last 36 years has been to keep the excess out of the general economy and stuff it in the investment sector, but even that is getting saturated and investors are panicking about how to keep making money on their money.
Interesting times ahead.

Economists and bankers no more fully understand how the economy works……
Yes, as an economist i can tell you the confusion is great. All the theory of money gone. Zero interest rate and no inflation. People trust virtual money against all the odds. Governments print money as it was greeting cards, and still no inflation in the horizon. Real estate is sky rocketing everywhere where is enough trust, that the government will not confiscate property. Production efficiency of goods is dropping to zero (marginal cost of a car, without marketing and design costs, made of thousands of components produced all over the world costs less than an average salary). Oil price is in its historical low point. Services as entertainment and intellectual knowledge are given free of charge. (viz this blog).
Yet, people without originality and special skills are becoming irrelevant in the production process and either are becoming “dishwashers” or unemployed. Even if generously supported by the social systems, still unsatisfied, (viz the British coal miners voting for Brexit) and have revolutionary mood. Enough a charismatic leader, who is more committed to some case than the well known clown Boris and the world is again in danger of being grasped by some crazy nuts.

Sometimes what we think we know is like a flashlight beam, shining in the twilight. It illuminates a little, but blinds us to all the rest.
We have spent thousands of years striving to become more efficient in solving the problems life throws at us, but the blowback is our entire civilization becomes ever more focused on ever more abstract obsessions and ideals. Wealth, security, power, etc. Meanwhile the rest of reality is cast aside as superfluous. So we have bank accounts based on debts of others, while the world which gives them meaning is crumbling.
We have to understand reality is not linear, but cyclical and simply going faster only ties us up in more knots of unintended consequences and blowback.
So it is another wave cresting and now for the other side.

Another excellent summation of this hopelessly divided country, now entering its fifth straight decade of an intractable drought of humane or imaginative thinking. You must save Europe by purging it of anything American. Examine everything that Americans have done, or like, and do the opposite. You must perform a USA-exit, or exorcism. Don’t hesitate. Do it now, before it’s too late. Save yourselves from our fate. Here we are hopelessly in the grip of a plutocracy dedicated to what Adam Smith called “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind…all for ourselves and nothing for other people.” It is a ruling paradigm that ensures a society of war of each against all.

There is an essentially balance between cooperation and competition. Even predators need some degree of cooperation in order to survive and becoming completely disconnected, as Washington is becoming, is not healthy for them. Simply being angry doesn’t give better insight.

America’s plutocracy doesn’t care what anyone thinks is “healthy” or not. They know that division, disorder, fear, and violence have always produced a milieu that results in profitable opportunities for the plutocracy.

The angriest voices in the US in recent decades have been those of the plutocracy itself. Plutocracy approved anger is that which keeps the lower orders divided. This is why they pay multimillionaire salaries to their own mouthpieces on their own ubiquitous media outlets. The most obvious examples being Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc.

What they fear most is anger that unites the people against the plutocracy, such as what manifested itself in Occupy Wall St or in the Bernie Sanders campaign. The reaction of the plutocratic owned media to those events was to immediately dismiss them as illegitimate.

Indeed, that’s very true. Plutocracy is partly pure fascism, being led by the few. Thus it depends upon people living by, and through, the few. Thus plutocracy has interest to foster celebritism, the incarnation on intellectual fascism. That’s why it fosters celebrities, even if they somewhat somehow, seem a bit contradictory to the main Pluto line (say Pope Francis, or some on Fox News).

Occupy WS and Sanders had crossed the line from fostering celebritism to damaging the Plutocratic ideal. That’s why they were taken down. And Trump, well, it’s a form of jaundice…

Because Obama was worth only 8 million dollars when he became president, and very little, power-wise. Yet. Whereas the Clintons have been at the top of state power (starting with Arkansas) since the 1980’s…. And their wealth is around 200 million dollars.

The fact that reality is a dichotomy, rather than monolithic, goes to our notion of time. People in the west associate it with space and so think of the future being in front and past behind, as they move through space.
In the east, they say the past is in front and the future behind, as we know the past and can see what is in front of us, while the future and what is behind are unknown. Which is how we really see reality, in that we witness events after they occur and then the information goes onto others, further away.
We think of the present going past to future, but it is change turning future into past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, as the earth turns.
So the present goes from past events to future ones, as events go from being in the future to being in the past.
Just as we, as individuals, go from being in the future, before we are born, to being in the past, after we die.
This is a bit like a factory, where the product goes start to finish, while the process goes the other direction, consuming raw material and expelling finished product.
Which goes to the issue of intelligence and efficiency. In that we are constantly distilling signal from the noise, as a factory distills a car from raw materials. Yet much is thrown and radiated away in the process. Even the finished products eventually wear out and are discarded. As we as individuals die.
So the ultimate consolidation is a black hole, where everything is radiated away in an ever more efficient vacuum of energy. This noise/energy/gases/heat/etc, eventually starts to coalesce into new fields and forms, starting the process over again.
Reality is only linear like the surface of the earth appears flat.
The past doesn’t dictate the present, so much as it is consumed by it.

The philosophical battle between East and West was won by the West. The East learned well. This is what the West should worry about. That the student is ready to replace the now self satisfied and degenerating teacher.

Brodix: In the system we have, where the individual can be endowed with huge powers, anything can happen, with either Clinton, or Trump. Obama did not do much, right, but he understood way too late he could have done better, be more willful…

Patrice,
I don’t think it is the people, so much as the system. In some ways Obama had about as much chance against the system as occupy wall st. What makes him a tragic figure is that he did, apparently, have a modicum of conscience, that he was willing to sell for the power and prestige.
I don’t think that is Bill or Hillary’s problem. They don’t seem to have any larger perspective than climbing to the top and that is why they are so good at it and why, once they get to the top, have no further goal than stuffing their pockets full, before everyone catches on.
It is what happens to a system that becomes its own center of gravity. As it implodes, the most self centered rise to the top, as that is the only guiding principle.

I see life as like sentence. You take the story you are given, make the most of it and pass it on to the next, without making it about yourself, as any good editor would cut you out.

Darin Stevenson This is a brilliant essay. I responded to the title, without first reading it, below. A danger of social media. I will read and re-read it. My thanks for your contribution, one I consider to matter deeply.